Bill Powers, embattled for years as president of the University of Texas at Austin, appears at last to be facing his Alamo. On Thursday, the UT Board of Regents will meet and Powers, mired in controversy over costs and mission, is expected to either resign or be fired. A face-saving compromise would be to let […]
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As everyone knows by now, the Supreme Court has just held in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (discussed here) that requiring the owners of a closely held family business to provide employees abortifacients that violated their sincerely held religious beliefs was barred by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (passed virtually unanimously by a Democrat-controlled Congress and […]
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I’ve long believed that the main threat to liberal education—real higher education, in my view—is our tendency to judge the success of academics in technical terms. Too often, social critics attack tenured humanities professors for their inefficiency and poor productivity. Though they think they’re saving higher education, these pundits are harming higher-ed more than political […]
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The Washington Post has helpfully compiled a table, using Clery Act statistics, of allegations of campus sexual assaults in 2012 (the last year for which figures are available, including all schools with 1000 or more students). To put it mildly, the data do not substantiate White House claims of a virtually unprecedented violent crime wave […]
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The College Board recently released its new AP U.S. History (APUSH) Curriculum Framework. It is, in many respects, a dispiriting document. A great deal of important U.S. history is given cursory treatment and some ideological themes are sounded rather loudly.
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Cristina Hoff Sommers–the “Factual Feminist”–has a few suggestions:
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In March 2007 Barack Obama bragged, as he has on other occasions, that “I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.” Of course, many much more prominent and prolific Obama-supporting law professors (easy, since Obama published nothing on the subject) do not “respect the Constitution” — […]
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The grades I just issued in my post-calculus, differential equations course – a sophomore math offering taken mostly by engineering students—followed the usual bell-shaped curve, roughly 10% A’s, 20% B’s, 40% C’s, 20% D’s and 10% F’s. The complaints came more from the D students than from the Fs.
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The Chronicle has a revealing piece on a group largely overlooked in the war on due process—college attorneys, who since 2011 have been aggressively pressured to establish systems to investigate one of the most serious offenses in the criminal justices system (sexual assault) with few, and in some cases none, of the tools available to […]
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Should you be allowed to hand out copies of the Constitution anywhere and any time you like at a public college? California’s Modesto Junior College didn’t think so. In 2013 its administrators and campus police prevented student Robert Van Tuinen from distributing Constitution pamphlets outside its “free speech zone” and without having requested to do so in advance. […]
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At the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009, leaders from more than a hundred nations gathered to consider an agenda that included a massive transfer of money from developed countries to the Third World. The developed states were tagged to provide $130 billion by 2020 to help developing nations deal with the consequences of […]
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Volokh Conspiracy Just yesterday I was pointing out that many people were misled about the content of George Will’s column on sexual assault by left-wing sites that manufactured outrage by putting a wholly inaccurate headline on a blog piece that proceeded to misrepresent what Will wrote. Now it’s my turn. Here’s the Gawker headline: Law Professor: […]
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It’s not just the Obama administration VAWA Office that thinks all sexual contact or behavior without “explicit consent” is sexual assault. So does Senator McCaskill (D-MO). Later this summer, McCaskill is going to propose legislation that would further undermine due process on campus. According to Senator McCaskill’s spokeswoman, she thinks that people (including, presumably, her […]
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In a recent article in the New York Times (6/17/14), economic columnist David Leonhardt says that “affirmative action as we know it is probably doomed”. I wish I could be so confident. Premature obituaries for affirmative action have been a periodic feature of commentators and op-ed writers for three decades now (I foolishly engaged in […]
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I recently looked at the inconsistent and in some cases outright arbitrary ways the nation’s leading universities are defining one form of campus sexual assault—rape that occurs because the accuser cannot consent. The piece made three points: (1) a substantial minority of schools have a definition of sexual assault that technically applies to many instances […]
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AEI’s Cristina Hoff Sommers is now hosting “The Factual Feminist,” an excellent YouTube series which punctures the conventional wisdom on “feminist philosophies and practices.” Today’s episode explores the damage Title IX has done to college sports:
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It’s important to remember that though college makes good financial sense, not all college degrees are created equal. A new paper by Temple economics professor Douglas Webber makes this point by highlighting a few factors which determine whether college is worth it. The first, major choice, surprised him. As he told the Chronicle of Higher […]
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When student activists tried to block some commencement speakers this year, conservatives generally denounced these efforts as censorship. Sure, these protesters were mostly aligned with the campus left, a group that has historically attempted to stifle free speech. These efforts were consistent with the decades of illiberality on our college campuses, a subject we and […]
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The politically correct speech enforcers at the Patent and Trademark office have just voted, for the second time, to cancel several Washington Redskins trademarks that contain the term “Redskins” because Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act “prohibits registration of marks that may disparage persons or bring them into contempt or disrepute.” (The first such decision, […]
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The Volokh Conspiracy Columnist George Will wrote a column recently that has attracted a tremendous amount of ire, including calls that the Washington Post fire him. The St. Louis Dispatch has now announced that it’s replacing Will with Michael Gerson. The announcement reads in part: “The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which […]
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